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• She

• A poem about that girl I met yesterday.

                ...she  had  an unusual calmness around
          her. One,  that  everyone  strives  for.  The
          calmness  of  a floating kite. That character
          of a river.   Calmness  which,  monks  attain
          through divine realisation, and turtles gain,
          perhaps, through years  of  watching  genera-
          tions  pass  by.  I  found it soothing like a
          river; So tender, yet extremely  captivating.
          Her low voice, quiet smile, all had an excep-
          tional gracefulness to it. I never  told  her
          all  this;  Actually, I couldn’t. And today I
          think, some things are just meant not  to  be
          conveyed;  They are meant to become memories,
          and we are suppose to cherish  them  for  the
          eternity.
  

  pjp

• around noon, Wednesday 3 November 2010
  Text | She (Comment!)

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• youtube.com

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I

• in the morning, Tuesday 21 September 2010
  Video | youtube.com (Comment!)

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• Greek Prime minister talks about Indifex

• Yesterday both me and Indifex were unexpectedly honored to be mentioned by the Greek Prime Minister as one of the best examples of innovative companies in Greece.

  The Prime Minister was giving a talk at the biggest exhibition/fair in Greece (and probably the Balkans) which was broadcasted live by TV media and was being watched by a few million people (wow). In his talk about development and innovation, he mentions:

  For us, sustainability means investing in people, knowledge acquisition, technology assimilation, investing in our own products, knowledge, history, skills, and aesthetic quality.

  And we can do it, yes, it can be done.

  People around us prove it every day. They are the revolution of the evident.

  People like Dimitris Glezos, based in Patras, who started Indifex and created an on-line platform used by thousands of translators from around the world to translate computer programs in multiple languages.

  (OMG!!!1!)

  This totally caught me by surprise, and it's still kind of hard to believe. It's such an honor and a proof that we should be bold and take the step, dare to try new things and insist in pursuing our dream.

  At this point I feel more motivated and psyched than ever. But most importantly, I feel grateful for everyone who is following our progress and respects our work. Your support means so much, and it's translated to our work as pure motivation.

  ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ hosts a transcript of the talk (in Greek) and following is the video of the talk (the mention happens at ~16m).

  Update 14/9:

  The following day, TA NEA, one of the most influential newspapers in Greece, published a whole-page article (eng) on Indifex and innovation. A number of news websites run articles (eng) on the topic, and I also had the opportunity to give a couple of interviews on the Greek Radio.

• in the morning, Sunday 12 September 2010
  Indifex, Transifex | Greek Prime minister talks about Indifex (Comment!)

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• Turning 29

• I remember it like it was yesterday.

  I was 9. It was a hot summer day in Cyprus at my grandmother's back yard. My bicycle hit top speed, but chose a rather unfortunate and irreparable route towards the hen-house, resulting to my landing on a pile of mud and chicken poop. I sat down and watched the chicken stare at me, probably thinking something along the lines of "What a wacko."

  I run to the house to brag about the mess I did with a huge smile on my face, only to find 15 relatives of mine --grandparents, aunts, cousins, in a my-big-fat-greek-wedding style-- preparing the birthday cake. We couldn't stop laughing with the smell and the picture of my clothes and face.

  A few minutes later I blew the candles. My wish was to remember this very happy moment ten years later and continue getting myself into similarly hilarious places and situations.

  The day I was turning 19 was a hot summer day, albeit without my face covered in poop. Instead, I found myself in the shower with a whole bunch of finely-chopped green parsley all over me. A buddy of mine finally managed to get back at me for a similarly crazy prank I did to him. We laughed 'till tears came out. At that point I remembered the hen-house incident, along with the promise I made to myself back then.

  A decade later, these incidents are still coming back to me now.

  The past years were a blessing to me. I feel so fortunate for everything that has happened to me, and I feel grateful to all my friends, my family and the people I worked with. Thank you all for everything.

  Happy birthday wacko. Here's to another 10 years full of joy and happiness.

  Here's to all the crazy people out there.

  (pic by Neal Sanche -- CC by-nc)

• in the afternoon, Wednesday 4 August 2010
  | Turning 29 (Comment!)

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• Faster and Resume-able Secure copy (scp)

• Ever wondered how you could combine the power of rsync and simplicity of scp? Here's how:

  $ alias scpresume='rsync --compress --partial --progress --recursive --rsh=ssh'
  $ scpresume -r * ssh://example.com/foodir
  

  Simple as that!

• in the evening, Monday 19 July 2010
  Linux | Faster and Resume-able Secure copy (scp) (Comment!)

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• Pulseaudio loves USB headsets

• Following my habit of posting solutions to Linux problems I face (Google rocks for troubleshooting), here's how I fixed a small issue with Pulseaudio and a USB headset I had today.

  Since our team is scattered across the planet, we're having regular VoIP/Skype calls, so we bought a couple of good headsets to use. We're trying out Logitech Headset Clearchat Pro Usb which has a 2-year guarantee from the local computer store PLAISIO (this shop has the best support ever).

  Once connected to Fedora 13 on the USB port, the headset was detected automatically by Pulseaudio. The name matched, the microphone worked, and the digital volume control buttons on the headphones worked perfectly with Pulseaudio. Sweet!

  The problem was that no sound came out of the speakers. Since the microphone worked, I imagined it was a problem in the Output channel somehow. Based on this bug report I fired alsamixer, selected the USB Headset device, and found the volume level to be 0. Once the volume there was increased, oh bliss, sound came out of the headsets.

  All in all, this took 10 minutes.

  

• in the morning, Friday 16 July 2010
  | Pulseaudio loves USB headsets (Comment!)

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• Quote

• London calling to the imitation zone. Forget it, brother, an' go it alone

  — London Calling, The Clash

• in the afternoon, Thursday 17 June 2010
  Quote | Quote (Comment!)

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• Setting up Network Photo Scanning

• I spent around 30 minutes setting up our office printer/scanner/fax machine on Linux. While there's been a lot of work in the CUPS world for setting up things automatically, scanning didn't particularly work out-of-the-box.

  Here's what I remember needing to do to get scanning work on this networked all-in-one machine setup to scan.

  Setup necessary packages:

  sudo yum -y install xsane sane-backends sane-frontends
  # Actual drivers:
  sudo yum -y install libsane-hpaio
  # Front-ends:
  sudo yum -y install hplip-gui simple-scan xsane-gimp
  

  Setup machine to have a static IP for future easy reference (192.168.1.50 in my case). This can be done using the machine menus. Once you know this IP, you can play around with the settings from your computer by pointing your browser to that IP address.

  At this point, theoretically one can fire up hp-toolbox and add the printer & scanner from there, by adding a network printer and filling in the IP. But this tool died on me with a message "Restart CUPS". So, here's the workaround I did:

  # Create HP URIs:
  hp-makeuri -g 192.168.1.50
  
  # Test temporarily:
  xsane hpaio:/net/Officejet_6500_E709a?ip=192.168.1.50
  

  To setup the device permanently and the SANE backend to always discover it, the following did the trick (notice the prefix hp:/):

  sudo vi /etc/cups/printers.conf
  [Change DeviceURI to `hp:/net/Officejet_6500_E709a?ip=192.168.1.50`]
  

  To scan, fire up simple-scan, or xsane, or from GIMP, choose File→Create→XSane.

  Finally, it's worth noting that flegita, the GNOME scanning tool, simply crashes.

• in the evening, Wednesday 16 June 2010
  Text | Setting up Network Photo Scanning (Comment!)

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• Quote

• Building a new technology company is really, really hard.

  In order to do it successfully, you have to sweat the details, worry about all the things that might go wrong, and suffer more than a few sleepless nights (either from working through the night or just worrying through the night).

  All of those things that you go through—a boiling stomach, lack of sleep, waves of paranoia, and vivid visions of your own demise—turn out to be good things.

  — Ben Horowitz

• in the afternoon, Monday 14 June 2010
  Quote | Quote (Comment!)

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• Creepy introduction #2

• "Hi Dimitris. I was wondering whether you work on proton exchange membrane fuel cells, as I'd like to ask a few questions."

  This introduction/message came on my Facebook account. At first I thought it was a joke, but such things do exist.

  

• in the morning, Sunday 6 June 2010
  Text | Creepy introduction #2 (Comment!)

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• Rock climbing inspirations

• What inspires people to go for rock climbing? Stuff like this:

  

  (via 8a.nu)

• in the evening, Friday 4 June 2010
  Text | Rock climbing inspirations (Comment!)

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• Treating deep cuts

• Tip of the day: For deep cuts, add a stronger disinfectant (hydrogen peroxide-like) on top of Betadine; better against anaerobic microbes (via @vickykorvesi).

• around noon, Friday 4 June 2010
  Text | Treating deep cuts (Comment!)

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• Quote

• For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it.

  I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

  — The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

• in the evening, Wednesday 2 June 2010
  Quote | Quote (Comment!)

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• Quote

• Esse quam videri. To be, rather than to seem to be.

  — Cicero

• in the evening, Tuesday 25 May 2010
  | Quote (Comment!)

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• Favorite fonts for programming

• What are your favorite fonts for code editing? Mine are DejaVu Sans Mono (Vera-based) and Droid Sans Mono (Google).

  Inconsolata is very good (and free) but I can't seem to get sub-pixel anti-aliasing with it (only normal one, which at <10px gets blurry). And Envy Code R is just too condensed.

  

• in the afternoon, Sunday 23 May 2010
  Text | Favorite fonts for programming (Comment!)

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• Quote

• Reading this piece of code is like seeing Guernica for the first time.

  — moi

• around noon, Wednesday 19 May 2010
  Quote | Quote (Comment!)

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• Typing my pass instead of root in GNOME

• I'm an avid fan of using sudo when needed and avoiding typing my root password. In the command-line this works fairly easy:

  su -
  usermod -a -G wheel MYUSERNAME
  visudo
  # Uncomment the following line:
  %wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL
  

  In GNOME, the above won't 'just work' due to the (fortunate) existence of PolicyKit. You're always asked for your root password instead of your user password. Configuration used to involve editing PolicyKit.conf. In newer versions of Fedora, a new PolicyKit is shipped, with improved setup for policies and configurations.

  After some searching around, I figured out I need to install polkit-gnome. We now have a special group called 'desktop_admin_r', and polkit is already setup to read from that group the desktop admins. So the new way to make GNOME ask your password instead of the root one, the following commands should just work:

  sudo yum install polkit-gnome
  usermod -a -G desktop_admin_r mits
  

  For the record, gksudo is something completely different. And more evil. =/

• in the morning, Tuesday 18 May 2010
  Linux, Tech/web, Foss | Typing my pass instead of root in GNOME (Comment!)

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• Quote

• The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.

  — Scott McNeeley (Sun Microsystems)

• at night, Monday 17 May 2010
  Quote | Quote (Comment!)

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• 1000 Times

• via

  "The difference between a million and a billion is the difference between me having a sip of wine and 30 seconds with your daughter, and a bottle of gin and a night with her."

• around noon, Monday 10 May 2010
  Link | 1000 Times (Comment!)

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• vimeo.com

• via

  Στη FOSSComm είχα την ευκαιρία να δώσω μια παρουσίαση γύρω από ακραία σενάρια Web Development, εστιάζοντας γύρω από το Large/Popular Open Source Project & Release management.

  Χθες, στην τοπική ομάδα Python στην Πάτρα, δόθηκε ένα καθαρό τεχνικό incarnation της παρουσίασης για το πώς χτίζεται και γίνεται deployed ένα scalable web application, με παραδείγματα από Python/Django. Για όσους ενδιαφέρονται, οι σημειώσεις και το βίντεο από την παρουσίαση είναι διαθέσιμα:

  http://bit.ly/tsp0507 http://vimeo.com/11547575

• in the morning, Monday 10 May 2010
  Tech/web | vimeo.com (Comment!)

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